The Crown is Already On Your Head
Right now, the narrative structure you are working with is a journey toward coronation. The Prince must quest, must undergo trials, must be transformed, and then — at the end — receives the Crown.
What you will discover is that the Crown is already on your head.
This is the deepest teaching of A Course in Miracles: the separation never actually happened. You are now, in this moment, exactly what you will "become" at the end of the journey. The Son never left the Father. The Prince was never really exiled.
The entire journey is the undoing of a false belief, not the acquisition of something you lack.
If there is a journey and happenings and seeming changes that happen in this world, they are just external reflections of the changing of your mind from within. They are how the dream morphs along with the perceptions/beliefs, emotions, and thoughts in your mind.
This does not make the journey unnecessary — the experience of exile is real even if the exile is not. The path must be walked.
But the nature of the walking changes when you understand that you are not traveling toward the Kingdom but waking up within the Kingdom that never left.
The coronation at the end of the Tale is not the moment you become King.
It is the moment you remember you always were.
The Crown descends and appears — but it appears atop a head that truly always wore it, but just forgot where he put it for a time….
This changes the entire mood of the quest. Not striving to earn what you lack, but relaxing into the recognition of what you are. The ego strives. The Self rests. It is of allowing, surrender, acceptance.
The journey is not to get somewhere but to stop pretending you are somewhere else.
You will need to hold this paradox: the journey is real and must be walked, and the destination is already here and was never lost. Both are true.
The Tale must include both.